Great cartoon !!
Your message is timely, thus proving you are SAGE. My new Hardy rod arrived this afternoon. (An 8' 10" ONE PIECE 10 wt. salt water model... ..The one Hardy hired Andy Mill to literally try to break while fighting large spinner sharks in the Ocean........ he couldn't break one.)
As you may know, I did lots of field testing for REC when they first came out with those Ti guides.
My work designing hip prostheses taught me a lot about metallurgy.... especially cobalt/chrome, sintered metals, and titanium.
Titanium is only "unreactive" in the human body fluids and salt water because it forms an oxide on its surface upon contact .... even with ambient atmosphere. This Titanium oxide is a form of ceramic. If you rub it off, it forms again in seconds .... or, in fact, as you are trying to remove it !
This means that the added teflon does little other than damp the vibrations which make the sound you hear as you cast when the fly line zips through those guides.
We salty guys don't object to that ..... BUT .. The dyed in the wool dry fly fishers who often enjoy the quiet solitude of a mountain stream did not like that noise at all. Also, the teflon can be made in dark colors which many trout fishers prefer.
I remember fishing with Molly Semenik a few years ago on a trout stream near Livingston, Mt.. I was using a "Sharkskin" line and those Ti guides. She didn't like the noise I made as I cast. (Of course the textured lines magnified the sound.)
Commercially pure Ti has a characteristic which can be a problem.... that of notch sensitivity. Scratch it and it may fatigue fracture at that point. The company we worked with added some aluminum and vanadium which solved the problem ( 6 Al/ 4 Va / Ti.)
Now, nickel is added to the Ti for the mfg. of those guides. Years ago, we had added Ni. to Ti. to diminish the friction wear of the femoral heads against the plastic sockets (Actually Ni. ion coating) .... but that didn't work.
Best,
Gordy
On May 2, 2012, at 11:55 AM, WALTER SIMBIRSKI wrote:
I can hardly wait to see what they come up with in another century or two. Teflon coated guides? Let's hope the Mayan calendar doesn't put an end to all that innovation. :)
----- Original Message -----
From: Dan McCrimmon <danmcc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, April 29, 2012 10:19 am
Subject: FW: Hardy Innovation
To: Gordon Hill <hillshead@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Walter Simbirski <simbirsw@xxxxxxx>
> Good ol' Hardy leads the way. After 140 years. innovation comes
> with a lot
> of conservative thinking and caution. Launching this technology
> was a bold
> move by Hardy standards.. and it paid off.
>
>
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Dan McCrimmon [mailto:danmcc@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2012 9:06 AM
> To: Denise Maxwell
> Subject: Hardy Innovation
>
>
>
> Hardy Innovation - Wall Street Journal
>
> Description: C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator.YOUR-
> 9EFCB93C24\MyDocuments\Hardy Price\Hardy Greys 2012\Hardy -
> Innovation.jpg
> Moore's Law is the leitmotif of the modern age: Incessant
> improvements in
> communication and computing are accompanied by incessant drops
> in price. Yet
> some quite low-tech devices are also experiencing Moore's Laws
> of their own,
> especially those that use new materials. Even something as
> mundane as
> fishing rods.
>
> Innovation in fishing rods requires no government program nor
> even results:
> Productivity is not really a fly-fisherman's goal. Instead,
> neophilia is the
> driving force. The avid fly-fisher arrives at a riverbank and
> finds his
> friend has brought a slender wisp of carbon fiber that's newer,
> lighter and
> more sensitive than his, with a cooler color, so he experiences an
> unquenchable thirst to spend money. (It's usually a "he.")
>
> Recently, the venerable firm Hardy of Alnwick, England-famous
> for more than
> a century for its elegant fishing reels but generally considered
> the maker
> of old-fashioned or overpriced rods-has launched a line of rods
> that has
> taken the fly-fishing world by surprise. Made from "sintrix"
> (for silica
> nano matrix), they are as much as 30% lighter and 60% stronger
> than existing
> carbon-fiber rods, the company says. But they are not cheap yet:
> A typical
> sintrix rod will set you back $700. Earlier this month, one of
> the new Hardy
> rods won a competition organized by the Yellowstone Angler, a
> famous tackle
> shop, for the second year running.
>
> Fly rods-whose look falls somewhere between a stick and long
> whip-aspire to
> an almost impossible combination of stiffness, flexibility and
> strength. A
> 15th-century German treatise shows how hard this was to achieve
> with natural
> materials: a slender blackthorn or medlar shoot was fixed to a
> tapering ash
> or willow stick after months of curing, drying and heating. By
> the 19th
> century, fishermen were using lancewood, bamboo and whalebone
> rods, soon
> joined by "greenheart" wood from a South American hardwood tree.
> Then came
> "split cane"-a bundle of slender fibers of bamboo, bound to make
> a whippy
> but strong rod-that dominated design until the 1970s, fighting
> off the
> challenge of glass fiber.
>
> Then, as with oars and golf clubs, split cane quickly gave way
> to carbon
> fiber, made from polymers that have been stretched, oxidized and
> heateduntil all that's left is ribbons of mostly graphite glued
> together with
> resin. The fibers are amorphous, meaning that, although mostly
> parallel with
> the length of the rod, they twist and double back on each other.
>
> Other sporting objects like baseball bats are being transformed
> by carbon
> nanotubes, molecular cylinders of carbon atoms that are among
> the strongest
> materials yet known, capable of enduring the tension of a weight
> of 11 tons
> on a cable with a millimeter-square cross section. But they're too
> inconsistent and stiff for a fly rod, Hardy concluded.
>
> When Richard Maudslay, descendant of the inventor of the lathe, became
> chairman of Hardy after a career in power engineering, he
> brought the idea
> of "finite element analysis," a mathematical tool that simulates
> stresses in
> materials so that new ideas can be quickly tested. Until then,
> innovation in
> fishing rods consisted in asking expert fishermen what they
> wanted next.
>
> Norman Fleck of Cambridge University used the finite-element
> method to
> determine that what was needed was material with better
> properties in
> compression. Working with 3M, Hardy tried impregnating the resin with
> 100-nanometer silica spheres, in effect lubricating the carbon
> fibers with
> minuscule bearings. The result was a spectacular combination of
> strength to
> resist a big fish and flexibility to whip a length of line out
> to land
> softly on the water.
>
> Science has moved on, and nanoparticles as small as 2 nanometers
> are now in
> use, so Mr. Maudslay wants to do it again. He argues that
> improvements in
> materials, from steel to plastics to silicon, are the keys to
> understandingthe industrial revolution. Fixated by bits and
> bytes, we sometimes forget
> the importance of innovation in "stuff."
>
> A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C4 in
> some U.S.
> editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: High
> Tech Runs
> Through It: The New Fly-Fishing.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Description: Description: hardyAE_colour_180px (2)
>
> www.hardynorthamerica.com
> <http://www.hardynorthamerica.com/>
>
> Dan McCrimmon: Western Canada Sales;
>
> Master Certified Casting Instructor,
>
> Two Handed Casting Instructor, FFF Board of Governors
>
> 604 602 0344
>
>
>
> Hardy North America LTD. 1260 Corporate Blvd, Lancaster, PA
> 17601
>
> Office # 888-516-1247
>
> "The Best Fly-Fishing Gear Ever Made"
> Forbes Magazine
>
>
>
>